DigiFREN is a collaborative European project that seeks to understand how the use of digital technologies to experience natural environments changes environmental perceptions in Europe.
2022-2025
Finn Arne Jørgensen
Digital Aestheticization of Fragile Environments (DigiFREN) is a collaborative project led by University of Ljubljana, with partners from University of Stavanger, Jagiellonian University, University of Eastern Finland, and the Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research Zagreb.
Project Aim
DigiFREN is a collaborative European project that seeks to understand how the use of digital technologies to experience natural environments changes environmental perceptions in Europe. Using innovative methods that engage the senses through walking, DigiFREN studies the shifting relationships between the human, the environmental and the technological. The Stavanger team adds a historical dimension to this study by exploring how repeat photography allows communities to connect with multilayered histories in landscapes.
About DigiFREN
DigiFREN is an interdisciplinary collaboration between scholars in ethnology, anthropology, and history that explores how “nature” is reframed, mediated, and augmented through digital media technologies. Centered on active fieldwork and walking methodologies, the project develops innovative and creative ways of investigating technologically-mediated relationships with the environment.
Each of the five partner institutions work with specific field sites for deep engagement with local environments and communities. The UiS team uses Sørmarka as their field site. Located in Stavanger and bordering on the neighboring municipalities Sandnes and Sola – and the University of Stavanger campus – Sørmarka is a young forest that is actively used for recreational purposes and that is under constant pressure from encroaching urban developments. Planted as part of a school project about 100 years ago, Sørmarka demonstrates how “nature” simply doesn’t exist, but can be created, maintained, and threatened, in contexts that are close to human everyday lives, rather than a pristine elsewhere. The UiS team of DigiFREN has developed methods and materials for exposing and reflecting on environmental change in local landscapes. Using historical photos and modern mobile phone cameras, students working in classroom assignments have searched for the location of the original photographer to create composite images that overlay the historical image on contemporary spaces.
Project Team
Department of Cultural Studies and Languages
Department of Cultural Studies and Languages
Publications
An overview of DigiFREN publications
Finn Arne Jørgensen and Malin Graesse, “Past Photos in Present Landscapes: Rephotography as a Method in Environmental History,” NiCHE, 7 June 2024.